Let us begin, then, with the fall of 1993. Your mother had dropped you off at school that morning and had, on her way back to your apartment, stopped at a Duane Reade. Let us say she needed to buy a new hair dryer. Really, does it matter? In the grand scheme of things, no it does not, but let us say that we know for sure that what she bought was a hair dryer, a small pack of Band-Aids, and Tylenol PM.
It is important to us that you understand just what and how much we know about your mother and about the man and woman who abducted her, and about you.
Your mother was taken just as she left the store.
You have been led to believe that the man and woman who took your mother were the anarchists Manuel Guzman and Nadja Prcic, that she was abducted by these two and returned to a secret location in Queens, where she was brainwashed, such that she forgot who she was, who you were, or that you were even a you to be forgotten about. After which, she was moved in secret to Houston, then to Managua, where she was trained to be a freedom fighter, and then, from there, was snuck across the Atlantic into West Africa, where she was given further instruction and deeper brainwashing. Then, during an operation — the attempted (and foiled) detonation of a bomb in the London Underground — your mother was killed.
You have seen the photographs.
You have read the dossiers.
You know the reports.
As far as you are aware, you have killed everyone involved in the operation but for one man who killed himself.
It is our unfortunate responsibility to inform you that in all of this, however, you are wrong, though only because you have been misled.
As of this moment — as we are penning this letter to you — your mother is still alive.
75
By the end of the assault it had been a minor miracle that she was standing still, much less fighting. Much less crushing skulls with her bare hand.
Even she had known that the arm had managed all the heavy lifting, had pulled her along, had made all of the decisions, moving her left or right, punching or not punching, crushing or not crushing, according to its own mysterious rubric.
And she hadn’t cared. Let the arm do what it wanted to do.
But when it was all over, she could barely stand, much less walk. Her arm held her up, propped her against one of the few remaining cubicle walls.
The doctor declared her unfit for anything but the emergency room and then stitched her up as best he could. Her busted lip. The bulging, purpling bruises on her cheek and over her eye. The cauliflower of her ear, which had been boxed again and again. He applied cream, a salve of some sort, to the places where they had placed the electrodes and the hot pokers.
Her ribs, three of them, had been broken. He couldn’t do much for those.
Internal bleeding he handled as soon as he could get her into the operating room.
Then there’d been the shock of losing her arm, and then of the arm’s return, the emotional and mental rigmarole that had gone hand in hand with all of that, but she kept that for herself. She could have handed that to the doctor, too, and maybe he would have handed her something back — a tranquilizer, maybe, or a hug. But that, the emotional thing that had happened back there, the weeping and sobbing into her shirt, the liquid feeling of feeling whole again — that she kept for herself.
But despite all of this, despite the pain of torture and hastily performed field surgery to remove her arm and despite the fighting and the reattachment, despite all of this, nothing had happened to her foot.
Her foot — both her feet — should have been fine.
76
By the time the doctor saw her the next morning, she couldn’t walk unassisted. She hobbled into the examination room using a crutch. Her breath rasped; her skin had paled. She had a fine, pungent sheen of sweat clamming to her face and neck and chest.
Not a few times during the night had she considered cutting off the foot herself, cutting it off just below the calf.
After an examination and X-ray, the doctor told her there was nothing wrong with her foot, and she considered punching him through his face.
Lately, she had been considering punching people through their faces a not-inconsiderable number of times.
So much did she want to punch him through his face, her mechanical arm had come up to punch-through-the-face level. Her fist was a closed and ready-to-punch fist.
She forced it down. She exerted a great deal of force of will to make it go down. When it did, it grabbed hold of the edge of the table in a serious and life-threatening way.
“Check,” she said. “Again.” She gritted her teeth. Her fist gripped the table hard enough to crumple the edge of it. She didn’t care. All she could do was grit her teeth or crush the table with her fist or crush the doctor’s skull.
He checked again. He didn’t know what was wrong. He gave her something to take for the pain. She looked at the bottle he handed her and shoved it back at him and in the same fluid motion grabbed him by his collar, her fist cocked and ready to punch again.
He gave her something much stronger.
By the afternoon, her foot was green. The entire foot from the tip of her toe to the top of her ankle.
Not a deep green, not a green you would call forest or sea turtle or even just green, not yet, but it wasn’t yellow either.
It was beyond yellow and was moving confidently into the green family of colors.
The sight of the green foot made the doctor blanch, made him stutter. He rubbed his hand through his thin hair and pulled it down tightly over his face. She grabbed him again and pulled him close and he smelled like sick, or sick and sweat, and she was desperate now.
People had to fucking carry her there, and she was now desperate.
“Cut it off,” she said. “Cut the fucking thing off and do it now.”
77
Not only is your mother still alive, but you have seen her and she has seen you innumerable times. It is possible that you and your mother have seen each other on a near-weekly basis now for the past seven years that you have been working for the Regional Office, working for Mr. Niles and Oyemi, working for the very people who took your mother from you.
Manuel Guzman and Nadja Prcic, while not the best of people, while guilty of a number of crimes and sins, and not exactly undeserving of being hunted down and smote by your lovely mechanical arm, had nothing to do with the abduction of your mother but were simply offered up by Mr. Niles — along with the other men and women you stalked and killed, men and women the Regional Office would have gotten around to dealing with eventually if not for you, so do not blame yourself for their deaths, which were hastened, surely, but not by much. Mr. Niles has, for this long time, been working to control you and your movements, all in an attempt to hide from you the very information you came looking for.
Your mother is much changed from how you would remember her. Have you figured it out? Have you guessed yet where your mother is, who your mother has become?
It is not our intention to be coy or to throw puzzles at you like obstacles in a training course, but it is simply our hope that if you can come to the conclusion on your own, if you can take the small pieces of this we have given you and pull together a full picture of what wrongs have been committed — against you, against your mother — then you will more likely believe this truth than the one you were fed by Mr. Niles.